Programming Languages

Why is the  Nineteen Eighty-Four  novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course? In this last entry of the coruse I will give my opinion about the Nineteen Eighty-four novel and the article titled “Language as the ‘Ultimate Weapon’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four".   “Different languages impose different conceptions of reality” I think that this phrase is very powerful and it is true, quotidian languages like English or Spanish or Japanese have their own culture behind them and when you understand them you start to have a different perception of life and thinking.  The same happens with the developers, we need to learn more and more programming languages and each programming language has their own rules and sometimes a very different syntaxis that give us different ways of thinking when we are solving problems, this is very important because we do not think the same when we develop in Python, C, C#, Clojure or Java. ...

The Roots of Lisp In this blog I'll talk about the article called "The roots of Lisp" by Paul Graham, who is a british programmer who founded Viaweb and he is the co-founder of Combinator. The author describes the origins of LISP, where Jonh McCarthy participated in the creation. Paul made a review of what John MacCarthy found when he discovered this new notation to do the mathematical notation more easier to understand. This reading has been the most difficult to understand of the whole course, so I will try to make a brief summary of what I could understand and give my opinion. The articles begins with the differences between the structure of the programs in C and LISP, and he mention two basic types, that was the atoms and the lists. Lists refers to the concept that we have always understood in programming languages, but in the case of atom, it's a new concept for me, atoms in LISP is a word for all data types that are not cons cells (like numbe...

The Promises of Functional Programming In this article, it explains that functional programming is not frequently used for 2 main reasons, one is reason is that functional programming is very different from traditional programming (also referred to as imperative programming) and thus requires a lot of learning and unlearning and the other reason that I did not know is that computer hardware implements the imperative programming model, so imperative programs are easier to compile into efficient machine code than functional programs. I agree with the author because thanks to these reasons it makes easier for you as a programmer to understand what the computer does and what you’re programming. Nevertheless, functional programming has a lot of advantages that it can "cost" you to understand better your code but it will have a better performance, for example, a set of programmers dislike that syntax in Clojure for a simple multiplication is represented like this: (* 2 2) . Thi...

Triumph of Nerds In this first part of the documentary we saw how the great computer companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft were created, and how the third most powerful industry in the world emerged. We saw how Bill Gates started with Microsoft and he did not care about the money, he only continue with what he had invented. There was also talk about MITS, which was the company that dedicated to creating first calculators and then computers, but when it did not update itself in its business, this company went to the broken bank and had to close. We can see how the nerds managed to create something incredible, and not because of the need for money, if not, they did it for fun, like the 10 year old they interviewed, who was buying things at a garage sale and the one from the 6 years had already begun to get into the world of technology and just for fun. Also in this first part, they showed us how some programmers work, and since their offices are more like a second home, w...

Rich Hickey on Clojure In this episode they talk about the programming language we are using Clojure, the creator of Clojure was invited to this podcast, Rich Hickey worked almost two and a half years to be able to put Cloujure to the public. Clojure is a programming language that is based on LISP, the language that is based on lists that we have been talking about in the previous posts, this programming language can be executed in the virutal java machine that is as we have been applying it during the course. Rich mentions that the structure of clojure is built on symbolic expressions that are converted into data structures, before being compiled, these expressions are characterized by taking parentheses in all the operations to be performed, from defining a function, to a simple sum, also is delimited by the prefix notation. The creator of clojure also talks about two big differences between LISP and clojure, one of these is that clojure represents a series of immuta...

Revenge of the Nerds The pointy-headed boss who speaks in the article, is an experience that I have had to live, there are people who are in charge of the area of ​​technology, but are not related to it. For them it is very easy to say in what programming language they are going to be programmed, but they are not able to understand the advantages and disadvantages of programming languages, because it is simply something they do not know and have not studied. Many times they allow themselves to be guided by what the competition or other people do, without first analyzing the advantages and disadvantages that they may have when using that programming language. Knowing several programming languages ​​gives you the ability to know which is going to solve the problem better, you can make less lines of code with one, but it does not look completely good. That is why the importance of knowing from the most basic programming language, to the most advanced. The article talks ...